NEW YORK--Former Six Apart executive and well-read blogger Anil Dash has a new gig: he announced at the Web 2.0 Expo here on Wednesday that he will be the director of Expert Labs, a new nonprofit that will take the dot-com incubator model and apply it to new digital tools for the federal government.
"Despite what our ego tends to think in the tech industry, the issue is not that we need to have more tweeting from the White House," Dash said onstage. "(We can) help them learn the lessons that we've seen over the past half decade of Web 2.0's ascendence."
Expert Labs, which is a division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that's funded by the MacArthur Foundation, will match digital voids and holes in government and policy with the developers who can fill them, with grant money paying for the work. The organization also hopes to host developer competitions, a similar move to some municipal projects like New York's "Big Apps."
It's not a government agency, but the Expert Labs Web site explains that "we've been privileged enough to connect with agencies and departments across the federal government, from the White House on down." Cutting through bureaucracy, needless to say, will still be a challenge. Dash is unfazed.
"If we tap into the expertise of each community, there's enormous potential," he said. "So we're going to ask policymakers for their expertise in defining the questions that we need answered." Then, Expert Labs plans to hook those projects up with technologists who can build the requisite systems, and then to members of the science and academic communities to help solve the issues at hand.
"No matter how smart the policymakers are in our government...there's always going to be more experts outside the Beltway," Dash said. "The tactics thus far have been a closed-door meeting with a half dozen people for an hour."
He asserted, "The Web has changed the way that works."
WASHINGTON--Washington may be a city of policy wonks, but the District's self-proclaimed "tech geeks" are intent on adding some Silicon Valley flavor to the capital.
Hundreds of Web 2.0 evangelists flocked to a school auditorium in Washington Friday morning to kick off Government 2.0 Camp, the inaugural event of Government 2.0 Club, a national organization created to allow government, academia, and industry to collaborate on Web 2.0 solutions for government.
Attendees of Gov 2.0 Camp wait for different discussions to start.
(Credit: Stephanie Condon/CNET)Leaders in government agencies have been slow to adopt Web 2.0 technologies, bemoaned many government-employed new-media strategists in attendance. Yet in a well-attended discussion at the event, the new-media directors admitted that if they were to use more online tools to engage citizens, they wouldn't quite know how to tell whether it accomplished anything.
"I have no idea how to measure success," said Sarah Bourne, chief technology strategist for the Massachusetts Web site Mass.gov.
"It's kind of like the pot issue," she said, referring to the deluge of marijuana-related questions users submitted to the White House on its "Open for Questions" tool--and which became the elephant in the room during President Obama's online town hall on Thursday.
Whether a conversation is meaningful "has to be definied from the citizens' perspective," Bourne explained. Yet if they lead the discussion to a seemingly insignificant topic, is the discussion still a success?
"We all want to hear from the public, but we want to hear meaningful stuff," said Joy Fulton of the U.S. General Services Administration. "How do you filter what's going to help us, and filter out what's just noise?"
The user-driven nature of Web 2.0 technologies may create complications for the government, but it served as an effective format for the conference itself. The two-day Gov 2.0 Camp was billed as an "unconference," in which the participants planned the entire event themselves in a collaborative manner on site.
"It's like a Woodstock for the 21st century," said A.J. Malik, a technologist for the county of Arlington, Va., and one of the attendees.
After a brief introduction, the organizers turned the microphones over to the hundreds of attendees packed into the auditorium at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Over the course of an hour, each person there introduced himself and briefly described the issues he hoped to learn more about or lead a discussion on.
The organizers jotted down notes during the introductions and quickly slotted together a schedule of discussions to take place. The attendees all set down their laptops and iPhones to crowd around the large piece of butcher paper with the schedule scribbled on it.
Bourne and Fulton made their comments about meaningful citizen discussions during a session called "Engaging the Public and How You Define Success."
Bourne said that Mass.gov visitors often question whether anyone in the government even reads user comments on the site. Yet addressing user comments has proven to be a challenge, since they are often off topic.
"If you're talking about how our unemployment office can be improved and they go off on a rant on gay marriage, that's not useful," she said.
Max Harper, a social-media consultant who worked for the Obama transition team, said Web 2.0 tools have to be refined to better meet the goals of civic engagement. For instance, if user questions and comments on a government Web site can be directed to a specific category, government officials can try to address every issue in an appropriate manner.
"But if you're not prepared to respond, don't tell people you're ready to respond," he said. "People know when something is inauthentic."
The Obama transition team, he said, was constantly critiquing its online engagement with citizens and refining the process. Even with the potential pitfalls, he said video discussions could significantly improve the government's interactions with citizens.
"Part of it is showing a face inside an agency and letting people realize they've made a human impact," he said.
WASHINGTON--Web companies had better get used to more government interference, intervention, and regulation targeting their businesses, Kevin Kuzas, vice president and general counsel for Comcast Interactive Media, said on Wednesday.
Kuzas gave a keynote address at a Web 2.0 forum on Wednesday hosted by business and legal publisher Pike & Fischer.
There's a myth among Web entrepreneurs, Kuzas said, that the government is irrelevant to their business.
Kevin Kuzas of Comcast Interactive Media speaks about Web 2.0 law on Wednesday.
(Credit: Stephanie Condon/CNET Networks)"There's a little bit of truth to this idea that policy makers are undoubtedly far behind," he said. "Government regulation can take years, while a Web 2.0 product is on a time frame of months, if that.
Web 2.0 companies will certainly attract more attention as larger companies enter the fray. Comcast Interactive Media started in January 2006, and along with Comcast.net, it runs a number of socially oriented ventures, such as the movie site Fandango and the social e-newsletter Daily Candy.
"So far, politicians have had a hands-off approach to the Internet," Kuzas said. "But "that kind of disparate treatment will go away over time."
Even though CIM is affiliated with a heavily regulated cable television business, Kuzas said it should be regulated more like Google than Comcast.
He said Congress is receptive to suggestions in the way it approaches Web law, particularly with respect to copyright law.
On Capitol Hill, there is "more recognition that the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is 10 years old and doesn't really fit these companies anymore," he said. Change is possible, "but we're looking at a multiyear time frame."
It's unclear how much of the talk was in reference to the Federal Communications Commission's recent action against Comcast on BitTorrent grounds, which the broadband provider has appealed, or a warning to Internet companies like Google that have been Comcast's political rivals on Net neutrality in the past.
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